Foundation
We are caretakers, not owners.
Squared Away Life is a tactical approach to stewardship. This page is about the part underneath the tactics, which is important to state plainly.
A steward is entrusted with something that belongs to someone else. The word carries its own theology. A caretaker manages a house he does not own, and he manages it toward the owner’s ends rather than his own. Strip out the owner and the word collapses into mere tidiness.
So the question any honest version of this has to answer is: entrusted by whom?
Everything belongs to God. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein” (Psalm 24:1). Not only our money and possessions, but our time, our abilities, our opportunities, our bodies, our households, our work, and our lives. Man was put in the garden to work it and keep it (Genesis 2:15), and the commission has never been withdrawn. What we have is on loan, and everyone to whom much was given will be required to give an account for how he handled it (Luke 12:48).
That is the foundation of everything here, and it changes the practical advice in at least three ways.
Everything you hold has an owner
Everything you have belongs finally to God, including what the law calls yours. You may hold property, run a business, build a house and leave an estate, and you answer to him for all of it. That sets the aim. Most productivity writing assumes the end is accumulation: more output, more margin, more control, and beneath that usually sits the wish to make a name. Stewardship names a different end. You trade with the owner’s capital and hand him the return, which is what the parable shows. The servants neither settled a debt nor kept the increase, and the master commended the one who had been wise with what he gave.
It makes limits honest
You are a creature. Your energy runs out, your attention fails, and one day you die. Systems are not a way to transcend that; they are a way to work faithfully within it. Heroic effort doesn’t scale, and it won’t outlast you. That is not a productivity observation. It is an observation about creatures.
It changes what counts as success
Faithfulness with what was actually given, rather than the size of the result. A small thing handled well is the point, not the consolation prize.
One foundation
Systems, disciplines and structures are built things. They stand or fall with what they are set on, and there is only one footing that holds. “For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11).
If you do not know Jesus Christ
Everything on this page rests on something more important than any system: the Lord over all, to whom the account is finally given. If you have never settled that question, start there rather than with your calendar.
I would begin with this short talk on what makes the gospel good news: God’s Gift of Himself. I wrote a booklet under the same title, published by Reformed Forum, and I will send you a copy at no cost. If you have any questions, or you would like to talk with somebody, send me a note here.
About me
I am a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the executive director of Reformed Forum, which is my day-to-day work and is about theology and the church. My books and articles are listed at camden.bucey.org. This site is about ordinary life under the same convictions: the house, the calendar, the ledger, the body, the business, and what is left behind.